Posts Tagged ‘asteroid’

NFL and elite soccer leagues everywhere are horrified: a new challenger has appeared! Finally, a sport where YOU CAN KILL THE OTHER TEAM without having to join a player’s union. The patch summary:

New game mode “PASS Time” substitutes a ball and goals to standard CTF play.

Pass the ball to allies or throw the ball with primary fire button; steal the ball with a melee hit.

“Gun Mettle” map Suijin updated to improve play around its central point.

New hat, “The Finder’s Fee”, awarded to users that report major exploits and bugs to Valve.

Bugfixes, including:

The Loadout Screen now shows the animation of any equipped Unusual Effects.

Demoman gained some missing voice lines when laughing.

MvM medigun shield will recreate when switching away, then back to medigun, while medigun shield is engaged.

Map voting now enabled with Workshop maps.

Don’t forget: “Gun Mettle” Season runs through September 30th, so you can be completing contracts while playing the new game mode.

1. Are You Ready For Some… Football? WTF?!

“Soccer? Is that you?” Actually, PASS Time is more of a capture-the-flag remake, with a single flag that spawns over a neutral point, and to be thrown into the opposing goal as the objective. And when you don’t have the ball (or “jack” as they call it), you’ll fight for it in typical TF2 fashion: destroying the enemy with your weapons. Official blog post here.

It’s a simple variation on the familiar CTF theme. All you have to learn is how to throw and pass the ball, and that’s simple: hold the primary fire button for a targeting cursor, then aim and release to chuck it. You can also pass it to allies in the same manner, and you can call out for passes as well.

Steal the ball from the enemy by killing the player and/or applying a melee hit. Stealing the ball (or being the first to recover it) will grant you a moment of invulnerability, health regeneration and a small speed boost. The game’s center of action will constantly be moving with the ballcarrier, so speed and mobility will be very important. Note that many of the recent weapon tweaks had this game mode in mind when they were launched.

PASS Time is currently in a live beta, similar to rd_asteroid has been for the last year. Currently there is just one map, pass_warehouse: a long, narrow map with plenty of rusty trailers to jump around, air lifts shooting you into the sky, and speed boost zones. Because of the beta, expect changes to be applied to maps and gameplay alike.

One difference: you have to take the ball to the enemy’s zone to score, not your own! You’ll be closer to enemy respawns when nearer their goal than not. You’ll definitely need teammates to respond to respawning enemies and goaltending sentries. There are also few ammo and health pickups, so don’t get killed too quickly or you’ll be scored on while waiting to respawn.

Joining a PASS Time Game

There are Valve Beta servers running Warehouse now, but they may not come up in Quickplay. Search for them in your Servers menu, and bookmark a Valve server, as it will probably be 24/7 for a while.

Early Meta and Strategies

Essentially, half of the team will try to attack or chase the ball, and the other half ends up defending (probably because some players don’t want to chase all over the map). These are the roles I’m seeing so far:

Scout: Right away, a lot of players will play Scout, just for the increased movement speed and jumping ability. Grab the Atomizer and Soda Popper for extra jump, and possibly Bonk! for your secondary, but a skilled Scout player will shine in a killing role also. This game could devolve into everyone playing Scouts, until you run into a goal-camping Engineer.

Pyro: When the enemy all goes Scout, naturally you’ll want to go Pyro so you can harass them with fire. But without water or cliffs to airblast them, Pyro is a little out of his/her element. Consider a Powerjack for speed and the Reserve Shooter.

Soldier: Rocketjumping really helps you get around, and you’re needed to destroy sentries and discourage campers. Your various buffs and the Disciplinary Action are necessary, since a single attacker usually fails to score. Try to convince your Scout to help you keep up. The Rocket Jumper may even be preferable, but then you can’t carry the ball.

Demoman: Although your role is defense, you’ll usually be chasing the ball and harassing the opposing team. Your stickies are needed to remove sentries, but you’ll shine as a demoman, charging ahead of others and stealing the ball with melee.

Heavy: You’re likely to spend most of your time between your goal and midfield, killing those who would take the ball, or guarding positions that would attack your sentries.

– THIS PART UNDER CONSTRUCTION–

2. Suijin: Waking Up From a Sniper’s Dream

Did you enjoy being able to take three steps out of spawn, scope up your sniper rifle of choice, and be able to cover both the enemy’s spawn and the map’s single point in the same view? Did you enjoy getting headshot every time you took a step to the left after you respawned from the last headshot? Well, koth_suijin has changed all of that.

As you can see in my screenshot above, two decorative, apocalypse-immune Japanese blinds has been placed horizontally on each side of the central point, preventing snipers from having an unobstructed view of the point or enemy spawn from their own. However, the blinds are not tall enough to protect against well-placed sentries on the top level above the point.

Also, note the fencing in the screenshot. It has been altered to allow easier passage around the spawn-side stairs on each side. The bridge on the neutral center, however, was not given this increased access.

Moreover, health and ammo pickups have moved around. There is a convenient walkway under the blindside wall’s bridge along the cliff, with a newly placed medium health kit that scouts and spies will surely appreciate.

3. Be a Bug Killer = Earn an Exclusive Hat.

In an effort to further encourage TF2 players to be on the lookout for game-ruining, economy-crashing game exploits, a standing bounty has been named by Valve for those who forgo the urge to be a profiteering haxz0r butthead and do the right thing in the first place: the Finder’s Fee is an all-class hat given by Valve when you self-report such bugs and exploits to Valve, such as a recent hack that allowed someone to create impossible items (like MvM robot weapons) with a Name Tag and an exploit. If you do earn this hat, you’ll probably Win the Internet for that day as well, so there’s that, too.

Hey, it’s not an unusual Cheater’s Lament, but people will recognize your contribution to the game. And the TF2Newbs community no-likey cheaters.

A known issue is that the full workshop map name is currently shown instead of the friendly name

Community request: Updated the FindMap and CanProvideLevel API for server-side mods. These functions now always expose the full workshop names for maps when known, even if not the map is not yet installed.

By the way, have you played the beta maps Asteroid or Cactus Canyon lately? They’re really coming along, and much more fun than when they were first launched. Today’s patch doesn’t change their terrain at all, but does add a few wrinkles to the play style for Asteroid.

Fixed zebra-style art on static props on systems that used lower texture quality

Added experimental cpu_frequency_monitoring convar to detect thermal throttling. If you have TF2 performance problems on Windows, add “+cpu_frequency_monitoring 2” to the TF2 command line to see if CPU thermal throttling is an issue. If the displayed CPU frequency percentage drops below about 80-85% then you may have a problem with your CPU slowing down due to overheating. If it drops below 50-55% then you may have a serious problem. CPU overheating can be caused by overclocking, insufficient cooling, insufficient airflow, failing or dirty fans, or other causes. The CPU frequency results are displayed with cl_showfps or net_graph. For more detail see https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2715-YIPD-6873

[EDIT: All servers are now back up. Any stats you earned while playing were logged and will automatically update on the next map reset, even though it didn't notify you in-game. As you were, soldier! --[N] Obey]